In the Village: Guessing can harm marriages

Why do marriages break up? Arguments about the children, about money, about religion, about sex; all these things are true, and all are incomplete.

Editor's note: This column discusses the challenges of marital communication about intimacy.

Why do marriages break up? Arguments about the children, about money, about religion, about sex; personality conflicts, incompatibility, bad conflict resolution; all these things are true, and all are incomplete.

When President Kimball told us that any Latter-day Saint couple of good will could make a happy marriage, he was right — but he didn't mean that it would happen automatically.

Quarrels over child-rearing or money or ambition or scheduling are rarely caused by those issues — though the issues are usually real enough, and need to be resolved.

Often the reason they can't be resolved is that spouses are so filled with resentment or anger or loneliness or despair that the subject under discussion is merely an excuse for lashing out to hurt the other person — or another reason to withdraw and move farther apart.

Some marriages fail because one of the partners is, in fact, utterly weak or completely evil: Desires and impulses cannot be controlled, with destructive results; or prideful people are determined to get their way no matter what the cost to someone else.

Such people are incapable of sustained partnership of any kind, and any marriage they're pretending to be a part of is doomed. But such people are rare. Chances are your spouse is not?one of them.

Most of the time, marriages fall apart despite the fact that both people are basically good and want to make it work.

Their marriage falters because, in their hearts, they have either the cold stone of disappointment and despair, or the boiling cauldron of resentment and anger, caused by a failure of intimacy; as long as such deep pain persists, nothing else goes well.

One of the meanings of marriage is "bringing together two unlike things to achieve a common purpose."

Men and women are unlike — deeply, profoundly different. And nowhere is this more apparent than in matters of physical intimacy. Male and female bodies have radically different hungers and are satisfied in very different ways — yet throughout the animal kingdom, their natural behaviors do result in the propagation of the species.

In a vast number of marriages, even ones that seem to be working rather well, times of intimacy leave one or both spouses feeling either the stone or the cauldron.

The results are loneliness and unsatisfied yearnings, which make them vulnerable to many temptations.

Part of being a good person — a responsible adult — is the ability to master temptation, to set it aside, to ignore it.

But isn't it better to also work to take away the stone, to cool that cauldron in your partner's heart?

In far too many marriages, matters of intimacy are never, never, never discussed, except perhaps to quarrel over frequency or the time of day or who initiates it.

We have the irrational and unjustified expectation that our partner will simply know what we want.

It will never happen. Your own body and brain will never teach you what will please your partner. You can only learn how to please each other by communicating clearly. With words. While you are so closely involved that each can act on what the other says.

A chaste woman at the beginning of a marriage is often more surprised than pleased by new sensations. It will take time for her to learn, over weeks and years, how her own body works.

She needs a patient partner who is willing to listen, to hold back, to do things differently, to learn along with her. It takes years. It takes a lifetime.

Popular Comments

I intend to save this and share it
with my children at an opportune moment.

8:34 a.m. Dec. 15, 2011

Top comment

julieharmony

Murray, UT

Thank you so much for a most insightful article. Having experienced both the
"cold stone of despair" and the "cauldron of resentment" I
just kept saying, "Yes! Yes! Yes!" to everything you said,
particularly relating to
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5:25 p.m. Jan. 14, 2012

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Lyle

Springville, UT

I hear the sound of millions of pairs of scissors snipping this column for later
presentation to newly-married couples or those soon to be married. The beauty of
that is that the couple's discussing the column is a step in the right direction
in
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